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About Craig Divis

I am a high school History teacher in Bremerton, Washington where I teach World World History and A.P. World History.
I was awarded acceptance into the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching program during the 2011-2012 school year. With this Fulbright, I traveled to South Africa to study the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa's history, including how it is incorporated into school curricula, how it is taught in school classrooms, and its impact in South Africa today and moving forward.

Legendary South African musician Hugh Masekela died on Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.

Known as the father of South African jazz, Masekela channeled the struggle against apartheid into soulful compositions that championed the experiences of ordinary South Africans. Masekela was introduced to the trumpet by anti-apartheid activist Father Trevor Huddleston in the 1950s.

He left South Africa in the 1960s to perform in exile, raising awareness of the international community to the evils of apartheid through his music. Much of his work was on exposing the brutality of apartheid, but also of inspiring hope to keep the struggle alive and to spread the beauty of South African culture around the world. Some of his most well-known works include the score for the anti-apartheid musical Sarafina! in 1987, which he co-wrote. His song, “Bring Him Back Home (Mandela)”, became an anthem for the movement to free Nelson Mandela in the 1980s.

“Hugh Masekela’s commitment to South African music and arts served as an immeasurable force in the fight against apartheid,” said Vivien Marcow Speiser, dean of Lesley University’s Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, in 2010.

His career spanned 5 decades, during which time he released over 40 albums and worked with a range of artists including Nigeria’s Fela Kuti, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, and his former wife, Miriam Makeba.

In 1990 Masekela returned home to South Africa, following the unbanning of the ANC and the release of Mandela.

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In a landmark ruling, a South African judge ruled that Ahmed Timol, an anti-apartheid activist who died in police custody in October 1971, did not kill himself as authorities have long claimed but was murdered by police officers.

Judge Billy Mothle ruled that he “was pushed” out of the window of the 10th floor building where he had been detained by the apartheid police.

Timol, a 29-year-old anti-apartheid activist who had been a member of the South African Communist Party, the ANC, and Umkhonto we Sizwe, died after falling from police headquarters in Johannesburg five days after his arrest.

Officially, police records say he leapt to his death from the infamous John Vorster Square, now called Johannesburg Central police station – a verdict endorsed by an inquest in 1972.

His family, however, fought the ruling for decades and have campaigned hard to secure the legal review, which finally began in June 2017.

“Timol did not jump out of the window but was pushed out of the window or off the roof,” said Mothle. “Members of the security branch … murdered Timol.”

The judge called for the security branch officer Joao Rodrigues, who admitted helping to cover up the murder, to be prosecuted, but he acknowledged that the men actually responsible have since died.

“Most of the main perpetrators have since passed on [but] all security branch officers responsible for guarding and interrogating Timol are collectively responsible for his injuries,” Mothle said.

While the ruling was solely about Ahmed Timol, it paves the way for scores of similar cases, and a new examination of some of the darkest episodes of South Africa’s recent history.

The judge called for families who lost relatives in circumstances similar to Timol’s to be assisted in reopening their cases, particularly when suicide was recorded as the cause of death.

At least 73 political detainees are believed to have died while in the hands of the police between 1963 and 1990, but some believe that number to be much higher. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg lists 115 people that died in detention during that time span. Official explanations for these deaths range from jumping out of windows and falling down stairs to suicide by hanging and slipping in the shower.

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No one has ever been held responsible for any of those deaths, campaigners say.

This was the first inquest in democratic South Africa to specifically look into apartheid deaths in police custody.

“After this ruling we are hoping to see large scale investigations,” says Lawson Naidoo, head of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution.

There have been attempts at unearthing the truth in democratic South Africa such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

However, in recent years the TRC’s failure to compel apartheid loyalists who testified at the commission to “tell all” has come in for increasing criticism, along with granting perpetrators amnesty for their testimony.

While the hearings were hailed as a necessary process to help move the country into a peaceful democracy, many said it denied justice to victims of apartheid.

In the minds of many, justice will only come if those behind the murders and torture are prosecuted and punished for their crimes.

“You cannot forgive what you do not know, what was never acknowledged. The people who killed our children must be made to tell the truth and face the consequences of their actions,” says Phillip Mabelane, whose 23-year-old son Matthews was said to have jumped to his death while in police custody.

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On PBS this week, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. narrates a phenomenal and important documentary entitled “Africa’s Great Civilizations.” In each of the three episodes for this miniseries, he takes a new look at the history of Africa, from the birth of humankind to the dawn of the 20th century. This is a historical journey through 200,000 years of history, from the origins, on the African continent, of art, writing and civilization itself, through the millennia in which Africa and Africans shaped not only their own rich civilizations, but also the wider world.

From the Great Zimbabwe to the Swahili coast, from the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela to the pyramids of the Kush in Meroe, and from the ancient libraries of Timbuktu to the grandeur of the Kongo Kingdom, this incredible series shows the rich history of the African continent and the important role it played in world history.

Gates wants to change the way people outside Africa think about the continent. Too often people conjure up images of poverty and disease because few know of its great empires, its powerful leaders, its art and the trade routes that shaped the continent and beyond.

According to Gates:

The story of Africa has been systematically denied to us for two reasons. The first is slavery. The second is colonialism. Europeans had to invent an Africa as a place of emptiness and barrenness and backwardness in order to justify the enslavement of 12.5 million human beings who were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean between 1501 and roughly 1866.

And then, after slavery finally was abolished – the slave trade – European colonial powers looked at a big empty map of Africa and carved it up like you carve up a pizza pie. And they just passed out slices. They’d say, OK, Germany, you want Tanganyika – here. Senegal, this is for you, France. And what I wanted to do was to tell the story of the great African people and their civilizations.

Watch the series on PBS, or watch each episode online. Check out the trailer for the series below:

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While most of the violence connected with the South African apartheid regime occurred within South Africa, the apartheid regime went to great lengths to maintain apartheid for decades outside their borders, as well. This included not just military invasions and assassinations in neighboring states, including Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Angola, but also bombings and assassinations in Europe, as well.

One of the most high profile of these targeted assassinations was possibly that of Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.

Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme (1969-1976, 1982-1986)

Palme is the only European head of state to have been assassinated since before World War II.

He was gunned down in Stockholm as he was walking with his wife on February 28, 1986. He was shot twice in the back at close range.

Convicted murderer, petty thief and drug addict Christer Pettersson was initially convicted of Palme’s murder in 1988, but was later acquitted by an appeals court in 1989 due to insufficient evidence.

Despite eyewitness accounts and numerous leads over the last three decades, the identity of the killer remains a mystery.

Like the murder of US President John F. Kennedy, the killing of Palme has haunted Sweden ever since, and has attracted a legion of conspiracy theories.

Palme was outspoken on many issues, from speaking out against America’s involvement in Vietnam to supporting Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Organization. He had befriended Fidel Castro, and dared to take a leading role in the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

Palme was not alone as Sweden had a long history of being at the forefront of the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

In the aftermath of World War II, Sweden fully supported colonial self-determination so much that journalist Per Wastberg referred to it at such a level that “anti-colonialism was embedded in the Swedish consciousness.” They were not simply taking a stance of neutrality, but supported the forceful advocacy of decolonization.

Starting in the 1960s, Sweden was providing material support for liberation movements in Africa. This took the form of equipment, food, educational materials, and transportation. The Swedish organization that was formed to engineer this aid was the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), formed in 1962.

Freedom fighters were also welcomed in Sweden, making it a haven for leaders of liberation movements. While Britain and the United States were terrified to be seen with the “wrong” terrorist or guerrilla fighter, Sweden openly welcomed these leaders. Oliver Tambo, the president of the ANC, went to Sweden for the first time in 1962, starting a long relationship between the ANC and Sweden.

For many years, according to De Wet Potgieter in his book Total Onslaught, Sweden was the biggest funder and most loyal supporter of the ANC’s liberation struggle. More than 50% of the ANC’s finances for the military, propaganda, diplomatic, and economic struggles against the South African regime in the 1980s came from Sweden.

Sweden had even started funding the International University Exchange Fund (IUEF). Based out of Geneva, the IUEF was a Swedish initiative run from Stockholm. The purpose was to provide scholarships to victims of apartheid from South Africa, as well as students who had fled oppressive, right-wing regimes in Latin America, to study in Europe.

Sweden had also been the first country to adopt strict and unyielding sanctions against South Africa, having starting imposing these unilaterally in the 1970s.

The so-called Swedish People’s Parliament Against Apartheid, a collection of Swedish popular organizations opposed to apartheid, had also been formed and was also one of the world’s most powerful anti-apartheid movements.

Olof Palme, as prime minister of Sweden from 1969-1976 and 1982-1986, was the leader of Sweden’s anti-apartheid fight. He was an outspoken critic of South African apartheid, and he was proud of the leading role his country took in support of the ANC against the apartheid regime.

As a result, Sweden and Palme were at the forefront of European and worldwide action against apartheid South Africa. As a result, Sweden was fast becoming one of the biggest problems in South Africa’s war against the ANC.

One week before his death, Palme had made a speech condemning apartheid at a meeting of the Swedish People’s Parliament Against Apartheid in Stockholm, which was attended by ANC leaders Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki. While many people spoke at the meeting, including Tambo, Palme’s address was the most scathing.

Oliver Tambo and Olof Palme in Stockholm in February 1986

In this speech, on February 21, 1986, Palme did not mince words in attacking apartheid.

According to Palme in his address, “Apartheid cannot be reformed; it can only be abolished.”

Palme also advocated for a global boycott of South Africa: “We are all responsible for apartheid. If the world wants to eradicate apartheid, it can do so tomorrow, by simply withdrawing support for the apartheid regime. …The system will survive as long as it receives external support. If that support is withdrawn and turned into resistance, apartheid cannot continue to exist. If the world decides to abolish apartheid, apartheid will disappear.”

These comments were infuriating to the South African government, and clearly it gave some cause for concern about the sort of international anti-apartheid movement that Palme was calling for. According to De Wet Potgieter, “The South African government hated Palme… The economic and psychological toll that his anti-apartheid campaign took on South Africa was incalculable.”

In fact, as early as October 15, 1985, in a Military Intelligence secret report, concluded that Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was now an “enemy of the state” of South Africa. In this report, the most chilling section read: “Action proposed previously against Mr. Palme should now be given urgent attention.”

On February 28, 1986, Palme was assassinated.

Plaque placed in the sidewalk in Stockholm where Palme was assassinated in 1986

In the early days of the police investigation into the assassination, according to James Sanders in his book Apartheid’s Friends: The Rise and Fall of South Africa’s Secret Service, journalist Per Wastberg reported that the murder had been the handiwork of three South African agents. Wastberg received the information from one of her South African sources, yet her information was ignored by the Swedish police.

More than ten years after Palme’s assassination, Eugene de Kock, testifying in a Pretoria court, declared that he had notified the South African Attorney General of numerous apartheid crimes, notably the assassination of Palme.

De Kock had been the commander of C10, a counter-insurgency police force based just outside Pretoria, on a remote farm known as Vlakplaas. This government hit squad became the number one death squad for killing anti-apartheid activists, both in and outside of South Africa.

The government denied the existence of a group devoted to exterminating insurgents, but Vlakplaas’ purpose was to do just this. According to Max du Preez in Pale Native, “The list of murders, tortures, assaults, and kidnappings was long.”

In A Human Being Died That Night, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela points out that, “The covert operations program did not “officially” exist but was clearly necessary for apartheid to survive.” And the government saw it as that important that they pumped millions in secret funds into de Kock’s unit for years, according to Gobodo-Madikizela.

With the start of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), de Kock applied for amnesty and appeared before the commission for the first time in 1997. Before the TRC, de Kock confessed to crimes against humanity. He specifically confessed to more than 100 acts of murder, torture and fraud, taking full responsibility for the activities of his undercover unit.

One of these murders was that of Palme, which he said was one of Craig Williamson’s projects. Williamson was a South African Police major and an infamous apartheid spy responsible for a wealth of state-sponsored overseas bombings, burglaries, kidnappings, assassinations during the 1980s. From 1977, Williamson was a regular visitor to Stockholm. He has successfully infiltrated the IUEF, using it as a front to spy on the ANC and diverting funds away from its treasury back to the apartheid regime. However, there is no evidence that Williamson was in Sweden at the time of the assassination.

Williamson was investigated but never charged with the assassination.

Another possible apartheid link was Nigel Barnett, a South African military intelligence agent and a spy for apartheid South Africa. Barnett interestingly had been adopted as a child by a family with Swedish antecedents, had visited Sweden on numerous occasions, and could speak Swedish. Barnett also had videotapes of television coverage of Palme’s assassination and an airline ticket stub from Johannesburg to Stockholm from 1986. When investigated by Mozambique authorities about the murder of Palme, Barnett even failed a polygraph test when asked if he had murdered Palme. However, there is no evidence that Barnett was in Sweden at the time of the assassination.

Barnett was investigated but never charged with the assassination.

Another possible apartheid link was Roy Allen, who worked with the South African Military Intelligence in the 1980s. He worked as a spy in Europe and was in Stockholm on the night of the murder – February 28, 1986. He was questioned by South African investigators in 1996 about the Palme assassination but was never charged.

In fact, no South Africans have ever been charged with the Palme assassination.

Sweden has now named a new chief prosecutor to lead the inquiry into the 1986 unsolved murder of the Palme. Krister Petersson, Stockholm’s chief prosecutor, has been brought in to oversee the case, which will start in February. Only time will tell if the mystery of this assassination will now finally be solved.

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With the passing of Fidel Castro, a lot has been written about his influence in Latin America, but Castro also had a profound impact on southern Africa, as well.

In Cuba it seems there will forever be two histories of Fidel Castro.

One is the revolutionary who succeeded and became the guiding star for all who saw the world through the lens of Marxist Leninism.

The other is the brutal dictator who suppressed democracy and kept his country poor.

There is one place where Castro undoubtedly made a difference: southern Africa.

The main presence of Cuba on the African continent was in Angola, which became a Cold War battleground in the 1970s and ’80s.

“The collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship in April 1974 opened the ﬁrst ﬁssures in the dam that protected white rule,” Piero Gleijeses, professor of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, states in his book, Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria & the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991, points out. The Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique became independent, and suddenly apartheid South Africa was nervous of these free black states in their neighborhood of southern Africa.

Almost immediately, the South African and US governments intervened to install a regime that was allied with the West as opposed to one that would be allied with the Soviet Union. Pretoria and Washington worked together to crush the left-wing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the Soviet Union and Cuba worked together to support the MPLA. As Piero Gleijeses points out, “Southern Africa had been hurled into the vortex of the Cold War.”

The Russians sent about 1,000 advisers and money but no combat troops. East Germany also sent military assistance.

Castro, however, saw an opportunity to exert his brand of international solidarity and make a difference on a global scale.

Between November 1975 and April 1976, 36,000 Cuban soldiers, as well as military advisers, tanks, and fighter aircraft, poured into Angola in an effort to help a new nation maintain its independence from the West.

Fidel Castro in Angola with President Agostinho Neto (r. 1975-79)

Poster of President Agostinho Neto and Fidel Castro after Angolan independence celebration

By April 1976 the Cubans had pushed the South Africans out of Angola. For the next ﬁfteen years – until 1991 – tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers remained in Angola. Their number peaked at 55,000 in 1988.

The Cuban role in Angola is without precedent. No other Third World country has projected its military power beyond its immediate neighborhood. Brazil sent troops to the Dominican Republic in 1965; Argentina brieﬂy intervened in Nicaragua in 1980-81; China’s military activities outside Asia were limited to the supply of weapons and the dispatch of a few hundred instructors to Africa.

Africans, Americans, Cubans, and Soviets jostled in a confusing landscape. They fought over the future of Angola and the decolonization of Namibia, Africa’s last colony. Beyond lay the great prize: South Africa.

In Angola in the late 1970s and 1980s, the left-wing MPLA government faced two enemies bent on its destruction: the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi (leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)), and the South African government. Pretoria was well aware of the MPLA’s commitment to help those who fought for the eradication of apartheid; therefore, the MPLA had to be destroyed. The South Africans bolstered Savimbi with economic and military aid. But the South Africans did more than help Savimbi: they waged war on Angola for longer than a decade, sending their troops at will into the south of the country to defeat the MPLA.

South African President PW Botha visits UNITA’s Jonas Savimbi

Sandwiched between Angola and South Africa is Namibia. It had been a German colony before falling under a South African mandate at the close of World War I. South Africa had subsequently ruled it its own province. In 1971 the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council had decreed Pretoria’s occupation of the country illegal and ordered it to withdraw immediately. South African officials knew that if Namibia were ever truly independent, it would have “an extremely negative impact on every front” for the apartheid regime. It would encourage “black militant groups in South Africa . . . [and] lead to a decline in white morale.”

In the shadows was the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the Namibian guerrilla movement that challenged Pretoria’s rule. SWAPO, a U.S. ambassador to South Africa wrote in 1977, “has, over the years, in the mind of the [Namibian] population come to symbolize independence, equal rights, and freedom from South Africa.” SWAPO, South African officials lamented, would win any free election; therefore, the UN-supervised elections that the international community demanded could never be allowed to happen. South Africa would never give up Namibia unless they were militarily forced to.

The SWAPO guerrillas were based in Angola, where the MPLA government gave them what, a South African general wrote, “is virtually a prerequisite for a successful insurgent campaign, namely a border that provided safe refuge.” In Angola, the SWAPO guerrillas were trained by Cuban and Soviet instructors.

Like SWAPO, the African National Congress had its military camps in Angola where its ﬁghters were also trained by Cuban instructors and armed by the Soviet Union.

Thus there was a complex and deadly interplay between Angola, Namibia, and South Africa. The MPLA helped SWAPO and the ANC, which fought against apartheid South Africa. The South Africans, in turn, wanted to topple the MPLA and hold on to Namibia.

The Cuban soldiers, armed by the Soviet Union, protected the MPLA government and thereby protected SWAPO and the ANC. Even the CIA acknowledged that the Cuban troops were “necessary to preserve Angolan independence.” Nevertheless, their presence there was intolerable to the US, which was seeing the world only through their Cold War-colored glasses.

It was through this lens that the US shamefully aided and supported the apartheid regime and its allies, while Cuba supported the anti-apartheid movement and its allies.

The first attacks were in 1983 and a full-scale battle took place in 1986 – the biggest battle in Africa since El Alamein in Egypt in 1942.

Cuba played a key role in deciding the fate of southern Africa. It was the Cubans who pushed the Soviets to help Angola. It was they who stood guard in Angola for years, thousands of miles from home, to prevent the South Africans from overthrowing the MPLA government. It was they who in 1988, with the reinforcements Castro sent, forced South Africa to concede defeat at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, and in doing so, forced the South African army out of Angola.

It was Cuba’s victory in Angola in 1988 that forced Pretoria to abandon Savimbi and UNITA and hold free elections in Namibia – which SWAPO subsequently won. It was they who ultimately forced both PW Botha and FW de Klerk to the negotiating table and helped break the back of apartheid South Africa.

Cuba ultimately ended its combat mission in Angola in 1991 after the South African military was defeated and forced to withdraw from Angola and grant independence to nearby Namibia.

In the words of Piero Gleijeses, “Cuba changed the course of history in southern Africa.”

Cuba played such an important role in helping bring down apartheid and free South Africa that Nelson Mandela traveled to the island in 1991 to publicly thank Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for their help. During his speech, Mandela said it was the Cubans who “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor … [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa.”

Mandela and Castro in Cuba in 1991

“The defeat of the apartheid army served as an inspiration to the struggling people of South Africa,” Mandela continued. “In Africa we are used to being victims of countries that want to take from us our territory or overthrow our sovereignty. In African history there is not another instance where another people has stood up for one of ours.”

According to Piero Gleijeses, “Cuba is the only country in the world that sent its soldiers to confront the army of apartheid and defeated the army of apartheid, the South African army, twice—in 1975-1976 and in 1988.”

Nelson Mandela clearly recognized this when he made Fidel Castro the guest of honor at his inauguration ceremony in 1994 upon being named South Africa’s first black president.

Bloemfontein, South Africa — a banner thanking Cuba as part of the ANC Centenary in 2012

To learn more about the fascinating role that Castro and Cuba has played in southern Africa, check out the documentary, Cuba: An African Odyssey: